What is The Kudzu League?
In short, it is a community of like-minded, driven, eccentric enjoyers-of-life! But to understand the community, you have to understand how it started.
The Kudzu League as a concept has been nearly ten years in the making. But if there was a singular point in time when it was conceived, then it started in 2018 when I received my final college rejection letter in line at a Costco gas station. I’d already received letters from Princeton, UPenn, Cornell, Tufts, Columbia (?) and a handful of others, but Yale, my mom’s alma mater, was the last.
Like tens of thousands of high school seniors across America, I’d spent 18 years building a ridiculously well-rounded resume full of awards and achievements across all kinds of disciplines–art, music, writing, academics and athletics–only to find out that none of it mattered. And not only did it not matter, I had no idea who I was and no sense of purpose beyond achievement.
As you can probably imagine, I didn’t take the rejection well. I cried for a length of time that would have had me committed in previous centuries. But after the grieving, I began the process of scouring reddit for camaraderie in similar stories. As always, reddit delivered. Thread after thread, rejected students vented about their resumes—18 AP courses, 5.0 GPAs, varsity captains, child prodigies, perfect SAT/ACT scores, and community service records that rivaled Mother Theresa’s. Students who by all means would thrive at institutions like the Ivies but who had been turned away and were left searching for answers.
What I realized in this process was that the power of the Ivies wasn’t in the education itself—really, the education wasn’t all that different from a state school. The magic of the Ivies was in the concentration of like-minded individuals. They are places where focused, driven, eccentric and eclectic minds can gather to network and solve problems.
This is where the idea of The Kudzu League comes in.
At big state schools where student populations can reach upwards of 30,000, it can be difficult to find the competent, dedicated weirdos. Sure, there’s academic clubs or interest groups, but nothing comes close to recreating an Ivy League environment. I spent my years at my state school, The University of Oklahoma, amassing an incredible group of friends, all of whom were multi-talented, curious, eccentrics like me: think German majors who taught themselves Swedish, who split the rest of their time between reading philosophy and Russian literature and producing EDM/house music, or former world-class triathletes who now worked as licensed therapists and created mixed-media art installations on the side. These are the kinds of people who fall through the cracks of the Ivies, and these are precisely the kinds of people who change the world by making it a much more interesting place to live.
When you consider that around 50,000 students apply to Yale each year, and only about 2,000 can be admitted, there’s a lot of highly qualified students who fall through the cracks.
The Kudzu League is my answer to this—an online community where the creative weirdos can congregate to collaborate, free of rejection or tuition fees.
Why Kudzu?
Kudzu grows more rapidly than ivy and is notoriously hard to kill. It thrives in hostile environments and takes over where it is planted. In the plant world, this kind of domination might be less than ideal, but in the human world, The Kudzu League is meant to be a rebirth of the original intent of a liberal arts education.